Motherlode |
Millennials Want Children, But They’re Not Planning on Them

Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Millennials Want Children, But They’re Not Planning on Them

By Katrina Alcorn January 8, 2014 2:16 pmJanuary 8, 2014 2:16 pm

As you’ve probably heard, the United States sorely lags behind most developed countries when it comes to support for working families, which makes it very difficult for parents (and, in particular, mothers) to work. But most of us can’t afford to stop working — our families need our income. So what options do we have?

Not many, once our families are in place. But if a new study comparing Generation X and millennial attitudes is any indication, the upcoming generation of potential parents may choose “none of the above.” The study found that the rate of students graduating from college who plan to have children has gone down by roughly half in just two decades.

In 1992, when Stewart Friedman, the author of the study and a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was a new father just starting to explore how to integrate work and family in his own life, he found that a solid majority of Gen X graduating students at Wharton (78 percent) said they planned to have children.

Twenty years later, in 2012, he conducted a similar study with a new generation of students and was shocked by the results. Fewer than half of the millennials said they planned to have children. In other words, the percentage of students planning to have children dropped from 78 percent to 42 percent in just 20 years.

“When I first saw those numbers on my computer screen, I thought, No, that can’t be right,” Dr. Friedman said.

While millennials are planning fewer children, other potential parents simply aren’t having them. A few years ago, while I was working on my book about my own struggles to work and raise a family, “Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink,” I half-jokingly asked what would happen if we all went on strike and refused to have babies. I’ve never heard of women actually taking to the streets with my suggested chants (“Give us schedules that are FLEX or you get no procreative SEX!”).

Instead, without so much as a word, women (and men) around the world were silently making the decision not to have children. Birthrates in many countries in Europe and Asia were in steep decline at the time, and while the United States had held steady at a “replacement level” rate of about 2.1 live births per woman, that appears to be changing. The latest estimates suggest that we are currently below 1.9, a rate that’s potentially too low to sustain a relatively large number of retirees. “Generation Child-Free” would not bode well for our economy.

When Dr. Friedman set out to look behind his surprising numbers, he found that millennials had more anxiety about the future, in part because they started their college years during the Great Recession, and graduated with more student debt than the previous generation. Over the two-decade span of his study, the time requirements for work had shot up by a full 14 hours per week. Millennial students were steeling themselves to enter jobs where a full-time commitment means working 72 hours a week. A majority of millennials in the study said they wanted to have children someday; they simply didn’t see how they could make it work. (Dr. Friedman has published his findings in a new book, “Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family.”)

Of course, it’s impossible to know if millennials will do what they say they’ll do; it’s one thing to declare a life plan when you’re 22; it’s another thing to follow through on it. But Dr. Friedman was quick to point out that when they compared what students in 1992 said and did 20 years later, “what they said was a pretty good predictor of what they did.”

Dr. Friedman believes that these findings are a wake-up call that our social and economic institutions need to change so that people who want to be parents can see a path to becoming parents. In the final chapter of “Baby Bust,” he makes a good case for providing world-class child care, expanding family leave for both mothers and fathers, and relieving student debt.

We need top executives to be role models and show young people that it’s possible to have a life outside of work, Dr. Friedman told me. We need to break the “culture of overwork,” remove the stigma that says a flexible schedule equals low ambition, and create alternative career paths that allow people to “ramp down” during care-giving years, and ramp up again when they’re ready.

Ultimately we need to reshape some basic policies and cultural attitudes to allow millennials (and other generations to come) who want to be parents to see a way to make that part of their life plan.

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more